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POLITICO reported back in March that there is no systematic process for tracking visitors to the Mar-a-Lago resort, which holds charity fundraisers and other events that are widely-attended. | Lynne Sladky/AP Photo

Secret Service: No visitor logs for Mar-a-Lago

There are no visitor logs or other system of tracking those who visited President Donald Trump at his winter retreat known as Mar-a-Lago, a Secret Service official confirmed Wednesday.

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Special Agent Kim Campbell said that her agency had a smattering of records regarding some foreign dignitaries and law enforcement officers who met Trump earlier this year during his stays at the Palm Beach resort he owns.

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However, Campbell acknowledged the lack of a comprehensive or even a routine process for tracking such visitors, such as the one used for the White House.

"The...search and review of records confirmed that there is no system for keeping track of Presidential visitors at Mar-a-Lago, as there is at the White House Complex," wrote Campbell, head of the Secret Service's Liaison Divison. "Specifically, it was determined that there is no grouping, listing or set of records that would reflect Presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago."

The Justice Department filed Campbell's declaration, signed under penalty of perjury, with a federal court in New York late Wednesday night in response to a FOIA lawsuit brought by three transparency-focused groups: the National Security Archive, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Those groups and others have been agitating for months for public disclosure of information on who met Trump at the Florida club or in other venues like the White House and Trump Tower. Many liberal activists contend that Mar-a-Lago offers an opportunity for wealthy club members and their guests to lobby the president on policy decisions, without any public disclosure or oversight.

U.S. District Court Judge Katherina Failla had imposed a September 15 deadline for the government to turn over information responsive to the FOIA lawsuit, to the extent it was not exempt from disclosure under various legal provisions, such as a protections for personal privacy or sensitive law enforcement methods.

At the deadline, the government turned over only a single document: a two-page list of Japanese officials who took part in Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit last February.

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In response, activists at CREW cried foul, calling for Failla—an Obama appointee— to consider holding the government in contempt for essentially ignoring a court order requiring disclosure of the requested Mar-a-Lago visitor logs.

“The government seriously misrepresented their intentions to both us and the court,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement last month, apparently referring to government lawyers' indications that the Secret Service was poring through a large volume of email records. “This was spitting in the eye of transparency. We will be fighting this in court.”

However, POLITICO reported back in March that there is no systematic process for tracking visitors to Trump's Florida resort, which holds charity fundraisers and other events that are widely-attended.

In a legal filing that accompanied Campbell's declaration Wednesday, lawyers from the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan denied that the government failed to comply with the court's order.

"The Order was simply a scheduling order," the attorneys wrote. "The Order was not a determination on the merits as to the legal status of the Mar-a-Lago records....Nor would the Court have had any basis to make such a legal determination at the outset of the case, without any record or briefing on the issue."

The Secret Service does acknowledge it has some records reflecting Trump's visitors at Mar-a-Lago. The agency, which provides security to the First Family and other dignitaries, says it has presidential schedules that contain some such information. But lawyers contend those schedules are actually presidential records, which are not covered by FOIA.

The government is similarly arguing that records of visits to the White House complex are covered by the Presidential Records Act and don't really belong to the Secret Service, even though it manages the system.

In 2009, President Barack Obama instituted what officials called a voluntary policy to disclose information on most White House appointments. The records were posted online three to four months after the visits.

In April of this year, Trump's White House announced that it would not continue that policy. A White House spokesman cited "national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually."

Campbell said the groups suing over the visitor information also agreed to exclude some categories from their requests, such as information about law enforcement personnel who took or sought photos with the president, as well as information about visits by members of Trump's family.

Campbell's declaration also reveals that the Secret Service was unable to find the initial request for White House Visitor records National Security Archive Kate Doyle maintains was faxed to the agency in January. The Secret Service also lacks any record of an administrative appeal Doyle claims to have faxed over in February, Campbell said.